In 2023, more than thirty years after it won the National Book Award, Norman Rush’s Mating (1991) enjoyed that rare and curious thing: a comeback. The reason, the New York Times ventured, was that ‘younger readers’, and young women in particular, who were ‘thinking seriously about romantic relationships’ found themselves reading Rush. His novel, in this light, acts as a kind of amorous almanac by which we can measure the extent of our own romance. I cannot vouch for the seriousness of my thoughts, but it seems only fair to admit to some intuitions or prejudices. One is that an equal love, a symmetry of affection and loyalty, is hard to come by. Another is that only in exceptional cases is this love equalising in effect so that, as in the case of Mating, a woman’s love for a man and his love for her mean that they are equal partners; in other words, that there is a parity of passion.
Rush, I think, would scoff at these objections. He met his wife, Elsa, at Swarthmore College. They worked as co-directors in the Peace Corps in Botswana (where Mating is set) from the late seventies to early eighties. They then moved back to America. When Rush finally published Mating, his first novel, he was fifty-eight. In an interview with the Paris Review, he admitted to having spent a protracted literary apprenticeship writing ‘gnomic’ poems about the ‘democratic Left’ and a novella which, like a bemusingly bad joke, followed ‘eight kinds of Trotskyites, five kinds of Communists, two factions dedicated to an obscure Dutch Communist’ at a cocktail party. While eager to take the edge off her husband’s esotericism, Elsa had been a patient partner and steadfast first reader throughout those years. As a result, their marriage has taken on an almost mythic quality in the minds of Rush’s readers. Joshua Pashman, the interviewer for the Paris Review, even confessed to his difficulty discerning between Norman’s email responses and Elsa’s; their conceptual cadences, the rhythms and reflexes of their writing, were so alike. Rush dedicated Mating to Elsa:
Everything I write is for Elsa, but especially this book, since in it her heart, sensibility, and intelligence are signally—if perforce esoterically—celebrated and exploited. My debt to her, in art and in life, grows however much I put against it.
The novel introduces itself as the ultimate gesture of uxoriousness. Lurking beneath this declaration of devotion is the tension that animates the novel and, at times, aggravates its readers; Mating celebrates and exploits its leading woman.
In essence, Mating is about a woman madly in love. It courts cliché in the fact that this man is older than her and also in the detail that the woman deems him to be cleverer than her too. At the novel’s opening, our narrator turns thirty-two. She is an anthropology graduate student from Stanford conducting field research in Botswana. But her doctoral thesis has ‘exploded’ into nonsense and she is keen to defer a visit to her apparently overbearing mother in America. So she resolves to stay in Africa in a state of ‘guilty repose’. The narrator is unnamed, but we learn in Rush’s 2003 sequel Mortals that she is called Karen Ann (this is a fact I find inexplicably devastating). As almost every critic has noted, she is intelligent, quick-witted and scathingly self-aware. By her own measure, she is moderately good-looking. She hears that Nelson Denoon, an academic whose seminars she desperately tried to attend at Stanford, is also in Botswana and attempting to establish a utopian community of African women in the Kalahari Desert. Hellbent on access to the great man she only glimpsed in America, she decides to love him. This resolution happily coincides with the dissolution of Denoon’s first marriage and our narrator is the first ‘to arrive at the scene of the accident’, the site of marital breakdown. Denoon’s wife, Grace, is almost miraculously magnanimous about the whole thing and is quickly dispatched from the novel’s nexus of competing personalities. Our narrator then crosses the desert alone to Denoon’s experimental colony, Tsau. Their subsequent courtship is energised by, what she calls, ‘intellectual love’, a cerebral kind of eroticism. By the close of the novel, Denoon’s idealist hopes for Tsau have dissolved into disarray and our narrator is back in America, this time with a potentially promising academic career. But at this final hour, Rush flirts with a reconciliation between the two. We end inconclusively: she is poised to forfeit her success for Denoon; he is in rather nebulous need of her company. It is unclear whether the equal match between hearts and minds is a glimmering mirage, a hallucinatory hope of a reunion, or a far frontier not yet crossed.
The question at the heart of Mating comes early on: ‘Why do we yield when we don’t have to?’ Our narrator adds that she would ‘like to know, as a woman and a human being, both’. But ‘yielding’ in Mating first appears as a calculated concession. In a rapturous moment at Victoria Falls, the narrator is struck by her loneliness and shortly after decides to seek companionship. Denoon is, of course, the ideal candidate: he is clever and competent and has all the allure of the unattainable. From the beginning, however, the narrator is both enthralled by his eccentricity and alert to certain nagging inadequacies. In their first interaction, which Rush relays in the form of a play script, Denoon diagnoses the failures of village development in Africa. Our narrator finds his speech, especially his voice, impossibly attractive but is infuriated by his talk’s tangential twists and his habit of being distracted by the depth of his own thought. ‘He was so famously sardonic! So heretical! He was so interdisciplinary!’, she exhorts in an unavoidably bathetic tricolon. Despite all of this, she pursues him. The reason why one person loves another is often entirely opaque to an outsider; their motives, and the emotional force that moves them, remain impenetrably mysterious. Almost everyone can think of at least one instance in which they witnessed a friend inconceivably expend time, talent and attention on some ill-fated fling. For Mating’s narrator, this phenomenon is often a matter of gender. She is dismissive about what she sees as a ‘horrible bourgeois ritual’ and a particularly female tendency to fall blindly head over heels. She believes herself to be above all this: she is weak at the knees only because she is willing to bend them. ‘Love is strenuous’, she says, ‘pursuing someone is strenuous’. She hints at a complex equation of effort and emotion, a heady mixture of self-determination and self-sacrifice. When she crosses the Kalahari Desert, an arduous odyssey involving escaped donkeys and prowling lions, she is exhausted but buoyed up by the extremes of her own daring. ‘How many women’, she asks, ‘could have done this, women not supported by large male institutions or led by male guides?’. It is an act of singular self-assertion, a Herculean achievement and all for a man who has, so far, expressed little interest in seeing her. Almost counterintuitively, it is only in pursuit of him does she prove herself to herself. There is a strange steeliness to the narrator’s devotion, hers is a ferocious personality that dictates the pitch and pace of self-forgetting passion . For a man, however, ‘yielding’ is almost beside the point. ‘Getting love out of a man’ is ‘hideous’, the narrator insists at one stage. A wrangling of fidelity and adoration, it is an ‘ordeal beyond speech’.
All of this is love as a seismic force, as a crossing-the-desert compulsion and not the quieter intimacies of daily life, as theory and not practice. This is how we first encounter romance in the novel because Mating, at least at its opening, is a rather chaste book. The narrator refuses to be ‘exhaustive about [her] carnal involvements’ before Denoon but we do glimpse them. The first is with Giles, a photographer who takes her to Victoria Falls. Theirs is a pantomime of passion in which neither party feels much inclination towards intimacy. The second is with Martin, an apparently malnourished, self-denying man. She does sleep with him but is coyly elliptical about the entire thing and the only information she is ready to relinquish about that relationship is the staggering amount she used to bake and cook for him. The third is with Z, an intelligence agent who first tells her about Denoon’s presence in Botswana. No consummation here either: he has scoliosis, and the narrator offers lengthy massages as an erotic proxy. With these men, she is often combative and always careful. The narrator’s reticence in these interactions, the caginess towards her own readers, suggests she sees these as romances which work on the level of ‘yielding’. It is a game of give and take, of calculated risk and return. With these men, the narrator performs on elaborate striptease of surrender that manages never to expose the naked body.
But when the narrator and Denoon are together, the novel threatens to abandon its anthropological attitude and is nudged into something more like a comedy of manners. ‘Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time,’ the narrator notes before advising that ‘keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing.’ She learns to yield by degrees, by habit and in the hope that it will sustain their relationship. In other words, she learns to yield not out of necessity but out of desire. But when Denoon suffers a sudden crisis of conviction and capability, the narrator is shocked by her own pliability. She is enamoured by a man she no longer recognises and the personality she prized is distorted by experience. The self-invigilation that characterises her narration is especially interesting here: she is forensic about her foolishness and is palpably uneasy about the role she now assumes, of the clingy, slightly spurned girlfriend. The result is that she resembles Denoon’s ex-wife and eventually she, like Grace, elects another younger, more beautiful woman to take her place in Denoon’s life. Her return to America is ambiguous: is it a definitive refusal to yield, her recognition that love too has its limits? If so, is it undone by the irresolution of *Mating’*s close and her potential return to Botswana, or is this really what she meant when she first asked why do we yield when we needn’t, even shouldn’t? Perhaps this the truest love she can imagine, the choice, freely made, to return to Denoon, demythologised and disappointed, and to love him in that state.
The open-endedness of Mating is famously tantalising, but I wonder if it indicates less about Rush’s clever contrivance of plot than about his sense of his own limitations. As she considers returning to Denoon and to Tsau, the narrator acknowledges that she has ‘made [her]self a field of academic study with only one specialist in it’; she has become her own anthropologist. There is a hubris hue to this assertion, a posture of self-possession, but at the close of his novel Rush renounces all its claims of self-knowledge. To the New York Times, Rush referred to Mating as an ‘account of an experiment’, about love and about the equality that can exist within it. Careful not to conflate the serendipity of his own circumstances with a more universal experience, he added that ‘people should consider what will make an experiment work — but remember that it’s an experiment with no guaranteed outcome.’ We cannot bet on a conclusion because, in his view, we are more alien to our own desires and decisions that we can ever fully expect and account for. In this light, we yield not because we have to but because there is something innate in us, inherent in that permanent comedy of intimacy, that suggests we should. It is an effort that we undertake, time and time again, almost in spite of ourselves.